Is it the obligation of great art to be continually interesting? I think not. Susan Sontag More Quotes by Susan Sontag More Quotes From Susan Sontag Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing. Susan Sontag camerasphotographynumbers Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism Susan Sontag quotationsironiccollecting I have been told that I am a "natural" feminist, someone who was born a feminist. In fact I was quite blind to what the problem was: I couldn't understand why anyone would hesitate to do what they wanted to do just because they were told that women didn't do such things. Susan Sontag feministproblemfacts To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better. Susan Sontag pastyearsart What, I ask, drives me to disorder? How can I diagnose myself? All I feel, most immediately, is the most anguished need for physical love and mental companionship - Susan Sontag companionshipdisorderneeds To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production. Susan Sontag erasartisthands It's not 'natural' to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting, articulate way. People living in groups, families, communes say little - have few verbal means. Eloquence - thinking in words - is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality. In groups, it's more natural to sing, to dance, to pray: given, rather than invented (individual) speech. Susan Sontag meaninterestingthinking Being in love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person. Susan Sontag being-in-loveruinsmean The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes. Susan Sontag recognitionbecomingwish To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time. Susan Sontag sageparaphrasethinking A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world. Susan Sontag attentionworldthinking Today everything exists to end in a photograph. Susan Sontag photographytodayinspirational Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it's the secret to good sex. Susan Sontag selfsecretsex Because each photograph is only a fragment, its moral and emotional weight depends on where it is inserted. A photograph changes according to the context in which it is seen: thus Smith's Minamata photographs will seem different on a contact sheet, in a gallery, in a political demonstration, in a police file, in a photographic magazine, in a book, on a living-room wall. Each o these situations suggest a different use for the photographs but none can secure their meaning. Susan Sontag wallemotionalbook taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. Susan Sontag tastepeopleideas Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies. Susan Sontag creationstrongfeelings One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this economic system, which has bestowed these unprecedented liberties, most cherished in the form of physical mobility and material prosperity, depends on encouraging people to defy limits. Susan Sontag libertysocietypeople To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power. Susan Sontag photographymeanworld Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was 'interesting'. Susan Sontag appreciationbeautifulinteresting Knowing a great deal about what is in the world art, catastrophe, the beauties of nature through photographic images, people are frequently disappointed, surprised, unmoved when the see the real thing. For photographic images tend to subtract feeling from something we experience at first hand and the feelings they do arouse are, largely, not those we have in real life. Often something disturbs us more in photographed form than it does when we actually experience it. Susan Sontag knowingrealart
